Interview With "Cover-Up" Directors Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus

The Next Best Picture Podcast

Tv & Film

4.2 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Cover-Up" is an American documentary film produced and directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. It explores the investigative journalism career of Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the U.S. Army torture scandals during the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The film had its world premiere out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and later screened at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals, where it continued to receive praise, resulting in nominations for Best Documentary Feature at the Critics' Choice, PGA, and Cinema Eye Honors. Poitras and Obenhaus were both kind enough to spend some time talking with us about their work and experience making the film, which you can listen to below. Please be sure to check out the film, which will be released in select theaters on December 19th before arriving on Netflix on December 26th. Thank you, and enjoy! Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture and listen to this podcast ad-free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast, and this is my interview of the directors for cover-up, Laura Poitris and Mark Obenhouse.
0:09.0	All right. Showtime.
0:10.4	All right. We'd love to talk about sources.
0:13.1	Let's put it this way. You'd love to talk about sources.
0:15.4	And I'd love not to talk about sources.
0:21.6	People... about sources. People, for a lot of reasons, they talk.
0:26.6	They talk to me.
0:31.6	People want to talk about stuff they did that was wrong and stupid.
0:36.6	All you had to do is just let their voice be the story.
0:41.3	There's a history of America that's so hard to write.
0:44.3	There was always writing stories that got certain people mad.
0:47.3	This fellow Hirsch is a son of a bitch. He's probably a communist agent.
0:51.3	So last week you broke a story about an army lieutenant who was accused of murdering 109 Vietnamese
0:57.0	civilians.
0:58.0	Nobody's willing to say, well, you know, the Army's lying through its teeth.
1:02.0	So I had some sort of appeal.
1:04.0	And a lot of people want to talk to him.
1:06.0	Sy's reporting was the trigger that set up the ugliest portrayal of a government agency.
1:13.6	Vietnam, Kissinger, Watergate, foreign assassinations, Abugray.
1:17.6	It just got worse, worse.
1:20.6	What the fuck is this doing in your hands?
1:23.6	I know how this stuff slipped into your file, but these are all people that I would never mention
	...

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